Afro-Venezuelans - History and Cultural Relations

The first African slaves in Venezuela were Ewe-Fon, brought in 1528 by
the Welsers, German bankers granted a special concession to settle and
exploit western Venezuela. Portuguese, French, and English slave ships
continued to bring Africans of diverse origins, primarily Bantu from the
Congo and Angola and Manding from the Gold Coast, until the beginning of
the nineteenth century. The slave trade in Venezuela ended before Yoruba
peoples began to be brought to the New World, distinguishing
Venezuela's slave population from that of Cuba and Brazil. Slaves
were treated as units of commerce, called
pieza de india
in reference to their physical size and potential for hard labor.

During the sixteenth century, slaves were brought to work in the copper
mines in Coro and Buría (Yaracuy) and to Isla Margarita and
Cumaná for pearl diving and fishing. Small-scale agricultural
plantations were also established in Venezuela, especially in the
regions surrounding Caracas. In the eighteenth century large shipments
of slaves were brought to Barlovento to support the burgeoning cacao
industry and to the sugar plantations in Zulia, around Lake Maracaibo.
Venezuela's slave population comprised 1.3 percent of the total
slave trade in the New World, compared with 38.1 percent for Brazil, 7.3
percent for Cuba, and 4.5 percent for the United States (Brandt 1978,
8).

The history of slave resistance in Venezuela, both in the form of
insurrections and runaway communities, began quite early. The first
documented rebellion was in 1532 in Coro, but the most famous uprising
of the time took place in the Buría mines in 1552. The rebellion
was led by El Negro Miguel (also known as Rey Miguel), who founded a
cumbe,
or
cimarrón
(escaped slave) settlement and raised an army of 1,500 slaves,
Mulattos, Zambos, and indigenous peoples to attack colonial
establishments. Communities of runaway slaves continued to grow
throughout the seventeenth century, and by 1720 there were between
20,000 and 30,000 cimarrones in Venezuela, compared to 60,000 slaves
still working on the plantations (Rout 1976, 111112). Barlovento was the
site of intense cimarrón activity throughout the eighteenth
century, with several cumbe settlements being established around Curiepe
and Caucagua. The most famous of these was that of Ocoyta, founded
around 1770 by the legendary Guillermo Rivas. After he led raids on
various plantations both to liberate slaves and to punish overseers, a
special army was raised to destroy Ocoyta and execute Rivas.

"Cumbe" derives from the Manding term for "separate
or out-of-the-way place." Usually located above river banks or in
remote mountainous areas, cumbes were typically well hidden and housed
an average of 120 residents. Such settlements were also called
rochelos
and
patucos.
Cimarrones were often assisted by indigenous tribes living in the area
(e.g., the Tomusa in Barlovento), and cumbe populations were composed
not only of Blacks, but also of Indians and even of poor Whites.
Cimarrón groups conducted raids on plantations, assisted in the
escapes of other slaves, and participated in contraband trading. The
only legally established town of free Blacks was that of Curiepe,
established in Barlovento in 1721 under the leadership of Captain Juan
del Rosario Blanco. The community was composed of former members of
Caracas's Company of Free Blacks as well as
huangos
from the Antilles. The latter were escaped slaves who, like all Blacks
fleeing non-Spanish-speaking islands, were granted freedom upon arrival
in Venezuela if they accepted baptism.

Afro-Venezuelans played a decisive role in the struggle for
independence. Initially, slaves fought for the Crown, believing that the
landowning creole Republicans were their enemies. In particular, the
notorious royalist battalion of General José Tomás Boves
attracted many slave soldiers. Bolívar, realizing the strategic
importance of Black soldiers in the fight for independence, declared the
abolition of slavery in 1812 and again in 1816, after promising Haitian
president Alexandre Pétion that he would secure freedom for
slaves in return for Haitian military aid. A major landowner himself,
Bolívar freed 1,000 of his own slaves, and in 1819 recruited
5,000 slaves into his army. José Antonio Paéz, a key
figure in Venezuelan independence, led an army of Blacks from the
llanos
(plains). One of his most famous lieutenants, Pedro Camejo, has been
immortalized in Venezuelan history as "El Negro Primero,"
because he was always the first to ride into battle. In the final battle
of Carabobo, Camejo was mortally wounded but returned to General
Paéz to utter one of the most famous statements in Venezuelan
history: "General, vengo decirle, adiós, porque estoy
muerto" (General, I have come to say goodbye, because I am dead).
A statue of El Negro Primero stands in the Plaza Carabobo in
Caracas—the only statue commemorating a Black in all Venezuela.
Curiously, he is always depicted wearing a turban, the same iconography
used for the mythical Negro Felipe (see "Religious
Beliefs"). With the declaration of independence in 1810, all
trafficking in slaves was outlawed. The decline in slavery continued
throughout the War of Independence when, at its conclusion in 1821, the
"Ley de vientre" was passed, stating that all children
born, whether of slave or free parents, were automatically free. By 24
March 1854, the date of slavery's official abolition in
Venezuela, less than 24,000 slaves remained.

Throughout the twentieth century, Blacks in Venezuela have faced subtle
forms of racial discrimination despite a philosophy of racial democracy
and an ideology of
mestizaje
that contends all groups have blended together to form a new,
indistinguishable type, called the mestizo. Yet underlying this ideology
is a policy of
blanqueamiento,
or "whitening," that has encouraged both the physical and
cultural assimilation of Afro-Venezuelans into a Euro-dominated
mainstream. An important semantic counterpart to the process of
blanqueamiento is that found in the term
negrear,
which denotes concepts of "marginalization" or
"trivialization." The emergence of Black intellectuals
such as Juan Pablo Sojo and Manuel Rodrigues Cárdenas in the
1940s, and more recently of younger writers such as Jesús
García, has helped counter the forces of blanqueamiento, or
assimilation. A strong body of research in Afro-Venezuelan history and
folklore has also been established by Venezuelan scholars, particularly
Miguel Acosta Saignes (1967). Public festivals such as the Fiesta de San
Juan have emerged as focal points in the reappropriation of
Afro-Venezuelan culture, articulating current transformations in a
living tradition of
cimarronaje
(resistance to the dominant culture, consciousness of being marginal).

User Contributions:

I was told my Grandmother and Grandfather, who lived in Florida, were of Seminole ancestral descent, Native Americans and Afraicans. Can you tell me the back ground of these people? Are Seminoles Seminoles because they were mixed with an other race of people or was this a pure trib before mixing with African Americans? Thank you for any and all the help you can give me. I would like to know is there still Seminoles in Florida and how can I trace my roots within this nation?
Thank you again.
Mary Harmon

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